This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 LicenseDeciding for yourself about research
Chapter 8, Nature of classroom communication: When is a student lying?
Although we might wish that it were not true, students do occasionally tell a deliberate lie to the
teacher. In explaining why an assignment is late, for example, a student might claim to have been
sick when the student was not in fact sick. Worse yet, a student might turn in an assignment that
the student claims to have written when in fact it was “borrowed” from another student or
(especially among older students) even from Internet.
In situations like these, is there any way to discern when a person actually is lying? Many of the
signs would have to be nonverbal, since by definition a liar’s verbal statements may not indicate
that falsehood is occurring. A large body of research has studied this question—looking for
nonverbal signs by which deception might be detected. The research can be summarized like this:
people generally believe that they can tell when someone is lying, but they can not in fact do so very
accurately. In a survey of 75 countries around the world, for example, individuals from every
nation expressed the belief that liars avoid eye contact (Global Deception Research Team, 2006).
(This is an unusually strong trend compared to most in educational and psychological research!)
Individuals also named additional behaviors: liars shift on the feet, for example, they touch and
scratch themselves nervously, and their speech is hesitant or flawed. But the most important belief
is about eye contact: a liar, it is thought, cannot “look you in the eye”.
Unfortunately these beliefs seem to be simply stereotypes that have little basis in fact. Experiments
in which one person deliberately lies to another person find little relationship between averting eye
contact and lying, as well as little relationship between other nonverbal behaviors and lying
(DePaulo et al., 2003). A person who is lying is just as likely to look directly at you as someone
telling the truth—and on the other hand, also just as likely to look away. In fact gaze aversion can
indicate a number of things, depending on the context. In another study of eye contact, for
example, Anjanie McCarthy and her colleagues observed eye contact when one person asks another
person a question. They found that when answering a question to which a person already knew the
answer (like “What is your birthday?”), the person was likely to look the questioner directly in the
eye (McCarthy, et al., 2006). When answering a question which required some thought, however,
the person tended to avert direct gaze. The researchers studied individuals from three societies and
found differences in where the individuals look in order to avoid eye contact: people from Canada
and Trinidad looked up, but people from Japan looked down. All of their answers, remember, were
truthful and none were lies.
If gaze aversion does not really indicate lying, then why do people believe that it does anyway? The
research team that studied this belief suggested that the belief does not actually reflect our
experiences with liars, but instead function as a deterrent to lying behavior (Global DeceptionEducational Psychology 337 A Global Text